Blog Juice for Educational Technology

I spent a good part of the afternoon today talking with folks from various WebCT campuses and all seem quite antsy about the proposed merger. Me, I’ve got other headaches. I get back to my hotel room after have Dinner and a few drinks with buddies from Frye, and there is a message waiting for me from my wife, all stressed out, because she can’t do my kid’s math homework. He is in 6th grade and they are doing something new.




The question at hand: under what conditions can you take four lengths and make them into a quadrilateral? Hmmm. I had an idea and tried to explain it to my wife on the phone. That was a total disaster. So I wrote up the following





https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/l-arvan/Capture1.jpg





But I’m scratching my head asking, can 6th graders articulate this? I couldn’t explain it to my wife, how could my kid explain it to his teacher? I’m all for giving conceptual problems to kids at an early age but if they are really to come up with a general solution to this in a pre-algebra class — that is asking a lot.




I do think using a Tablet for writing up stuff like this is really cool. If they were cheaper I’d buy one for my kids for Christmas.